Cadet Forces: Funding

Lord Boyce Excerpts

Thursday 22nd July 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Boyce (CB)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports; I have two cadets annually as my Lord Warden cadets. I am most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield, for securing and initiating this important debate.

There can be no doubt that the sea, Army and RAF cadets are a force for good for our country. I intend to focus mainly on the sea cadets, but much of what I have to say applies equally to their Army and Air Force counterparts. My general point is that they are all invariably a credit to the uniforms they wear and that, over time, thousands of young people who might otherwise have gone astray or not realised their potential have had productive and fulfilling lives as a result of having been cadets.

When looking at youth interventions, there is a perennial problem of whether the difference made is a sustained change to someone’s life into adulthood, and therefore whether it is good value for money. However, earlier this year we saw the publication of My LegaSea: Launching into Life, a report launched by former Prime Minister Theresa May. It involved independent research with 3,000 20 to 90 year-old former sea cadets and found clear evidence of sustained positive change for former sea cadets, long after they left their cadet forces.

The current reopening of society from Covid is leading to an increase in demand without the resources to respond. Children and young people have spent months locked up, so unsurprisingly there is a massive interest in engaging with youth work. Waiting lists are now growing and overall sea cadet numbers are already up by 3% from 1 April. Maybe it is the same for the Army and Air Force cadets. Right now there are increasing funds to kick-start the economy, but nothing is being applied to help kick-start the cadet youth sector in the same sort of way.

As an independent charity, Sea Cadets has been able to innovate to develop new models to reach out to hard-to-reach groups. For example, its On The Water outreach programme will support 1,200 hard-to-reach young people in Liverpool, Birmingham and London in July and August. The programme is pretty well externally funded by trusts, foundations and corporates, such as the Stelios Philanthropic Foundation, the Gosling Foundation and Capita, but if there were some government funding for these sorts of programmes, they could be scaled up substantially.

Across the cadet forces, a massive amount of value is added through volunteers, but the processes are not in place to unlock more volunteering. They are not what is increasingly becoming the norm in youth work: a brief intervention over a few weeks. Instead, adult volunteers work with young people over years to give them the skills they need to face the world. The biggest barrier to expansion is often insufficient adults coming forward. These volunteers provide a remarkable resource. For sea cadets alone, volunteers contribute the equivalent of over £54 million of work per year. The scale of the work of cadet forces would simply not be possible without them.

When thinking about funding cadet forces, it is vital to think about how we can unlock interest in volunteering. Examples of this could include providing tax incentives to employers to make it easier for their staff to volunteer, providing income tax breaks for the volunteer or introducing volunteering leave as a standard practice. Any discussion about the funding of cadets must take into account supporting the whole cadet ecosystem, not just the bottom line.